you! it belongs to you already-as I do. Dear, come and take it-and me. I love you-love you-love you. I want you to take me. I want to be your wife. Do you understand? I want to belong to you. I am yours.'

"So she tried, this untutored creature, to put her soul and body into words, to write the thing that cannot even be spoken, whose utterance is silence."

There is no need to follow further Mrs. Deland's analysis of the situation: the proud and practical reply from David, which the girl considers a rebuff; her sudden marrying of the man she does not love as sheer expression of outraged modesty, and recoil from the man who had not known how to treat her confession. There would be no wisdom in comparing The Iron Woman, from any other point of view, with the novels we have been mentioning. This one episode is interesting simply as a different and more convincing record of the frank young thing's relation to her own frankness, and of the fiery limits of that frankness; pages of racking accuracy, in which the girl nearly dies of the memory of her own explicitness. One has not even power to protest against Elizabeth's tragic and foolish act in marrying Blair; it follows upon that mood with the raw inevitability of life.

Some adherents of the new school may think it indelicate to base a general accusation

on the single point of the heroine's psychology. In the first place, the accusation is not so general as to preclude very definite admiration of other aspects of the school's achievement. There is much in Mr. Wells's New Machiavelli besides the hero's affair with Isabel Rivers; much that goes to the mind and heart of all of us. As for effectiveness of method and brilliancy of style-one simply does not see the need of adding one piping voice to the harmonious and already deafening chorus. Were there the need, one would do it.

But the contemporary school has set out to "do" a new type of woman: a type which it considers important, if not dominant. It has even the air of saying: "This is the kind of girl with whom intelligent men in the immediate future will have overwhelmingly (and to their salvation!) to deal. Behold the Newest Woman.'

The crux in each book, for the average reader, is the maturing of the relation between the man and the girl. The girl exists only, in spite of her intellectual qualities, for the sake of that relation. In each case, she is the ideal mate, the high exponent of her sex. She deserves, and must bear, serious consideration from every point of view. One has chosen the realistic point of view because realism is the method these authors abide by. They aim at telling the truth as it is; therefore, they stand

or fall by the accuracy of their vivid and multitudinous detail. We are not in the pulpit, but in the laboratory. One's honest impression is that the scientific observers have mixed their slides.

It is one thing to make your heroine believe in free love-doubtless many women do. It is pardonable to science to exhibit exceptions to the feminine rule, in the person of the girl initially over-sexed or neurotic: such cases are known to other scientists than these. But it is quite another thing to insist on the niceness, the normality, the uninterruptedly respectable and uneventful breeding of a girl-to exhibit her as the type, in other words-and then credit her with reactions that do not belong to the type.

There is no point in preaching against a modern spirit that is going to develop Anns and Hildas and Isabels ad libitum. The conception of them as heroines may be a sign of the times; but they themselves are not yet numerous enough to be a sign of the times. It is even doubtful if novelists can do in a decade what Nature has never shown any sign of doing in all her lazy evolutionary progress: completely alter natural feminine instincts. "But the worst of Ann Veronica is that she's there!" a friend complained to me, not long since. Everything has always been there, one fancies. All one insists on is that neither Ann

Veronica nor Hilda Lessways is the normal representative of the sex. About the morality of Mr. Wells's and Mr. Bennett's books, there are probably a hundred opinions. One's own present quarrel with them is not that they are bad morals, but that they are bad biology.

TABU AND TEMPERAMENT

W

HEN, I wonder, did the word "temperament" come into fashion with us? We can hardly have got it from the French, for the French mean by it something very different from what we do; though it is just possible that we did get it from them, and have merely Bowdlerized the term. At all events, whatever it stands for, it long since became a great social asset for women, and a great social excuse for men. Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings. At least, for many years, we never praised an artist without using the word. It does not necessarily imply "charm," for people have charm irrespective of temperament, and temperament irrespective of charm. It is something that the Philistine never has: that we know. But what, by all the gods of clarity, does it mean?

It means, I fancy, in one degree or another, the personal revolt against convention. The individual who was "different," who did not let his inhibitions interfere with his epigrams, who was not afraid to express himself, who hated clichés of every kind-how well we know that figure in motley, who turned every occa